Parlimentary Debate Workshop

The first week of August, I attended a one-week Parliamentary Debate Workshop at the World Debate Institute(WDI) at University of Vermont during my vacation from work.

That was wonderful.

Debate Camp bits

Parliamentary Debate camp 2008

People from differences – backgrounds, ages, states, countries joined the camp, learned and debated with others.

There were two debates, three electives and one evening forum daily. Last evening forum, Steve discussed “Samurai spirit” in debate. And we discussed about teamwork in tournament.

Excellent couches from other Universities.

Sweat-shirts for everybody. Hats for hat-winners recommended by couches.

Debate concepts: We briefly went over many concepts in debate, argumentation, reasoning, persuasion, fallacy and so on.

One fun fallacy is red-herring. The red_herring website is well-named🙂

Excellent chances to learn public speaking and other rhetorics.

Every minute counts so people spoke super fast on their feet. Especially those from Policy Debate background, virtually another language.

Where do we go from there? Many debaters later become lawyers, politicians, businessman, leader… Or simply, a good communication person with good logics.

Debate bits

Debate is the process to determine how change should come about.

Dr. Tuna is the director of the WDI at University of Vermont. He puts so many debate activities together and goes around the world to promote debate. Hopefully Vietnam context will be good to grow debating seeds.